Flatbed trucks bearing loads of steel pipe often barrel down these roads. Truck drivers often run into problems when they have to make wide turns onto narrow side streets.

Vilma Marenco was hit by one of those trucks on April 22.

She was driving home when she stopped at an intersection along Old Beaumont Highway, linking East Houston to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. She entered the intersection, less than a mile from her house, when an 18-wheeler ran the red light on Old Beaumont, crushing her Chevy Cavalier. Marenco's husband, Guillermo Gomez, tried desperately to reach her by phone.

"I called her and called her and called her, but she never answered," he says.

It would be hours before Gomez learned his wife was dead.

The Texas Department of Public Safety says the company involved, R & F Quality Transportation, shouldn't have had a truck on the road at all. It had racked up a string of safety violations in the months leading up to the crash, ranging from defective brakes to a driver smoking marijuana behind the wheel. When R & F failed to address the problems, state officials ordered it to shut down, an order the carrier ignored. All attempts to reach R & F for comment failed.

The death toll on Texas highways had been falling for decades, as car companies built safer vehicles. But that trend shifted into reverse as the boom in fracking began to heat up.

The Texas Department of Transportation says that between 2009 and 2013, the state's traffic fatalities rose by eight percent, even as those in most other states continued to fall. And deaths linked to commercial vehicle crashes, like trucks, soared by more than 50 percent over the same period.

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